Aussie firm set to bulldoze through protests
(Harakah Daily) – KUANTAN, Apr 19: Between obliging a business deal and the political backlash for going against the people’s wish, there have been no short of opinions and inconsistencies in the controversy surrounding Australian-based Lynas’s rare earth refinery plant in Gebeng, Kuantan.
Last week, the embattled Aussie firm, under intense protest from Kuantan residents to move out the plant, claimed it had received green light from the Malaysian government to store its radioactive waste on site permanently.
However, Lynas’s claim was quickly rejected by Malaysia’s Atomic Energy Licensing Board (AELB), denying any approval was issued for the corporation to store radioactive waste in Kuantan.
“Storage onsite will never be a final solution,” said AELB director general Raja Abdul Aziz Raja Adnan, as quoted by The Malaysian Insider.
As pressure on the firm piledup, Lynas reiterated that the ore that would be used in its soon to open Gebeng processing plant was harvested from Mount Weld, and would only have 0.17 percent of thorium, a number relatively lower than normal monazite ore, which contained 8 to 10 percent of thorium.
Despite the claim, the govenment of Western Australia said it would not allow Lynas’s radioactive waste to be returned to Australia after being processed in Gebeng.
“The Western Australian government does not support the importation and storage of other countries’ radioactive waste,” said the state government leader Norman Moore, whose comments earned immediate rebuke from Kuantan member of parliament, Fuziah Salleh.
“Now the Australians are saying that it’s our radioactive waste, not theirs!” she remarked on Twitter.
Australia’s Green Party had earlier called Canberra to ensure that no thorium should be ported out of the country from Lynas’ Mount Weld mine, citing the government would be complicit in the dumping of radioactive waste in another country if Lynas were allowed to export the radioactive waste to Malaysia.
On the potential to generate about 120 tonnes of thorium waste which would be stored annually on site, Raja Aziz said there was no way AELB would allow the company to accumulate that much of radioactive waste.
“We will not let them accumulate that much. We will stop them. They cannot be accumulating that much. There must be a parallel process,” he said.
Meanwhile, toxicologist Dr T Jayabalan, who treated leukaemia patients widely believed to be victim of the now closed Mitsubishi Chemical refinery in Bukit Merah, Perak, said if Lynas were to go ahead to process 22,000 tonnes of ore a year, it would generate 10 times more radioactive waste a year than the plant in Bukit Merah 20 years ago.
MB: It’s Lynas or closure of whole town
Saying thorium was hazardous, Jayabalan urged the people to stop falling into the industry’s “play of words” as no radioactive material could be classified as safe.
He said another radioactive element, radon, would also be released to the air when the ore is crushed.
